Troubleshooting Hive

This section provides guidance on problems you may encounter while installing, upgrading, or running Hive.

Hive Queries Fail with "Too many counters" Error

Explanation

Hive operations use various counters while executing MapReduce jobs. These per-operator counters are enabled by the configuration setting hive.task.progress. This is disabled by default; if it is enabled, Hive may create a large number of counters (4 counters per operator, plus another 20).

By default, CDH restricts the number of MapReduce counters to 120. Hive queries that require more counters will fail with the "Too many counters" error.

What To Do

If you run into this error, set mapreduce.job.counters.max in mapred-site.xml to a higher value.